The Structural Clock: Elif Güvençer on What Communications Must Become in the Age of AI

Elif Güvençer began her career agency-side at Ogilvy and Edelman before moving in-house, where she led the global launch of pladis, a multibillion pound snacking company, and the creation of its corporate communications function.

She is now in reputation advisory at RepTrak, and the author of The Two Clocks, an independent framework for communications in the age of AI. Her argument cuts beneath the usual AI talk of tools and time saved to a harder question: what is the communications function now for, and will communicators rebuild it before the answer is decided for them?

This was the second live Applied / Comms With AI Leader Interview – and it was a wonderful conversation to bring us into the summer. Many thanks to Elif for her time! What follows are the ideas, and the lines, that stuck, alongside the full video.

Two clocks, and the one we defer

Elif's framework began in frustration. The AI-and-comms conversation, she found, was stuck on the tactical: "content automation, monitoring dashboards, GEO. These are all useful, but not sufficient as a primary response." So she mapped two clocks. The first is immediate and outward-facing: monitoring, content, reputation management in an AI-mediated world.. The second is structural and inward-facing: "what do you need to become," and how your value gets measured once the old metrics stop counting.

Most leaders run the first and defer the second, and the cost is quiet but severe. "This is where mandate compression begins," she said, "because you end up with territory you cannot occupy, because you have not redesigned yourself."

A shortlist that is a verdict

Her way in is concrete. You ask an AI assistant which vendors to consider, and it hands back a shortlist. "That shortlist is two things," she said. "A commercial gate that defines whether the company has made the cut, and a reputational shorthand that starts to impact stakeholder influence before the organisation has even opened its mouth." The surfaces that feed it, news coverage, third-party validation, corporate sites, are ones communications already manages. "The function is already upstream of the AI engines."

In practice, that makes a five-minute test worth running. Take the questions a buyer would ask about you, put them to ChatGPT and to Claude, and read the gap between what they say and what you want them to say.

Shedding skin, and the measurement gap

Ask which of the framework's five dimensions leaders skip, and Elif is quick: strategic intent, the honest audit of what your value actually rests on. "No one wants to admit their value proposition is output-based." The block is not capability, it is exposure. "Both clocks require leaders to be vulnerable in two directions."

Outward, the immediate clock asks the comms leader to show up as a serious technology and risk thinker: a profile most have not yet inhabited publicly. Inward, the structural clock asks them to dismantle parts of the function that currently define its identity, visibly and under scrutiny. Most "live with the vulnerability they can manage, because it is socially acceptable" which means outward transformation gets the attention, and internal redesign gets deferred.

She calls the structural work shedding skin, and names the pain in it with the example every practitioner knows. "You prevent a crisis. Your KPI is zero. But you walk into your CEO's office with nothing to show, because the lack of something doesn't have a natural metric."

Editorial judgement and relationship capital still matter, she stressed, "but treat them as irreplaceable moats and you are investing in the old value model at the expense of the new." Her marker for the leaders getting this right is refreshingly small: "ring-fence at least 10% of your time and effort, not on the next tool, but on what you need to become."

The same clock, faster, for agencies

The measurement gap, she said, is "something AI did not create, but exposes," and it runs faster for agencies than in-house teams. "If your value is based on outputs and billing hours around outputs, you might be the budget item that gets cut." Her advice for anyone selling time is to move first. "If you can now do work that cost five hours in one, bring that discussion to the client before it arrives at your door."

The prize goes to whoever can prove their worth. "Whoever establishes that attribution infrastructure, the causal proof that this particular communications work drove that particular commercial outcome, will gain share and price accordingly." She is sceptical of the tidy replacement story too. "The cost of replacing a role does not equal the subscription fee of an AI assistant." Elif pointed to Ford rehiring roughly 350 engineers to redesign its AI tooling and fix what the technology had broken, and to new roles forming that barely exist yet: "an AI agent briefer, a reputation risk modeller to machines, not people."

Signal architecture: from relational to architectural

Signal architecture is "managing your reputation on the AI engines themselves," and its central idea is the sharpest in the framework. "Persuasion no longer starts from a blank page. It starts from a machine-made baseline." Communications was built for a relational world, where you can correct a person. "You cannot mediate with an engine. You cannot change its answer in a way that changes what it tells the next person who asks." Reputation management becomes architectural, not relational.

Visibility is only the start: "you can be visible, accurately represented, and still not make the cut. The harder question is eligibility." And to a machine, a claim is worthless without proof. "It says, don't tell me, show me. You need substantial evidence underneath the narrative."

In practice, that means managing reputation at the input level, the coverage, validation and evidence the engines ingest, rather than chasing the output, and putting a "truth layer" of sources under every brand claim. Communications has to do the job no one currently owns: "reading the whole" picture across corporate, brand and investor surfaces, and convening the cross-functional alignment to fix it when it drifts.

The slow thinker, and agents as spokespeople

On trust, Elif casts communications as "the organisation's slow thinker," and rests its claim to the AI governance table on one thing. "Communication is the only function whose object is coherence. It has no stake in how AI works." Every other function does, "and a department with a stake cannot mark its own homework." Yet on the review boards forming around AI, "IT, legal, compliance, HR, communication is most often missing. It won't be given to you. You have to earn your keep." That requires AI literacy, not necessarily enough to build but enough to challenge design and governance decisions while AI is being built, not after it fails.

Her most useful practical point is about agents. "In the agentic era, agents are becoming your operational spokespeople," talking on behalf of the company "all day, every day." The security is usually configured; "the reputation protocol is missing." Ask a live agent about a controversy involving the chief executive and a blank "I can't answer that" is its own reputational event. Her fix borrows an old discipline. "You would never let a spokesperson do an interview without asking the difficult questions first. Media-train the agents." Kerry Knight, in the chat, put the same logic another way: "You can't defend what you have not governed, and you can't govern what you do not understand."

One thing to do differently

I always close on a practical takeaway, and Elif fittingly asked for two, one per clock. On the structural: "The basis of value for communications is changing. Figure out what you exist to do, and how that gets measured and priced." On the immediate: "Start small. Write the questions your stakeholders would ask, put them to your favourite AI assistant, remembering there is no such a thing as a single AI, so choose the one that matters most to your stakeholders, and look at the gap between what it says and what you want it to say."

The irony she keeps meeting is that communications, a discipline built on anticipating everyone else's risks, rarely turns that lens on itself. The whole of The Two Clocks is an argument for doing exactly that.

The Two Clocks is at reputationsignal.co, and you can connect with Elif on LinkedIn. A real thank you to everyone who joined live, and to Kerry, Robert and Kristen, whose questions made it a conversation. The recording and this write-up live on appliedcomms.ai. Subscribe to the Applied / Comms With AI newsletter for future Leader Interviews, experiments and tool reviews.